Re: the " 'official' point of view" expressed by kernelnewbies.orgregarding reiser4 inclusion

David Masover
2006-07-31T21:16:42Z

David Lang wrote:
> On Mon, 31 Jul 2006, David Masover wrote:
>
>> Probably. By the time a few KB of metadata are corrupted, I'm
>> reaching for my backup. I don't care what filesystem it is or how
>> easy it is to edit the on-disk structures.
>>
>> This isn't to say that having robust on-disk structures isn't a good
>> thing. I have no idea how Reiser4 will hold up either way. But
>> ultimately, what you want is the journaling (so power failure /
>> crashes still leave you in an OK state), backups (so when blocks go
>> bad, you don't care), and performance (so you can spend less money on
>> hardware and more money on backup hardware).
>
> please read the discussion that took place at the filesystem summit a
> couple weeks ago (available on lwn.net)

I think I will, but I don't have the time today, so...

> one of the things that they pointed out there is that as disks get
> larger the ratio of bad spots per Gig of storage is remaining about the
> same. As is the rate of failures per Gig of storage.
>
> As a result of this the idea of only running on perfect disks that never
> have any failures is becomeing significantly less realistic, instead you
> need to take measures to survive in the face of minor corruption
> (including robust filesystems, raid, etc)

RAID seems a much more viable solution to me. That and cheaper storage,
so that you can actually afford to replace the disk when you find
corruption, or have more redundancy so you don't have to.

Because "robust filesystems" is nice in theory, but in practice, you
really never know what will get hit. RAID, at least, is predictable.

When it's not: Backups.